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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#331

Post by mindcrime »

frizlab wrote: post #176
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #141

The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very exp…

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft

Two thoughts:

A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow.

B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infringement should be considered "theft" at all. It's curious though, that historically hacker oriented communities tended to lean towards "No" being the answer to that. But the scale at which GenAI affects things may be the reason that sentiment seems to be shifting a bit?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#332

Post by ant_li0n »

MisterTea wrote: post #281
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not firing employees to replace them with AI. We're mostly engineers here I think. Does anyone actually believe they're replacing humans with the same AI that we're using in our day-to-days? I don't know about you, but my harnesses absolutely suck without a human driving them and the more knowledgeable the human, the less they suck. It's obvious they're just using AI as cloud-cover to act like assholes in the…

If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into. AI is in its infancy, it's just learning to crawl. There will be more breakthroughs which will have more serious consequences. Today engineers are safe, hold…

(Assuming that LLM does indeed multiply productivity) We are likely in for some rough days, as it's much easier to just fire people and maintain the same level of productivity. Musk (arguably) did that with Twitter, even before this started. I was impacted by a post-COVID layoff, myself.

But do you think that once that has leveled out a bit, the bandwidth/market bottleneck you referenced will be identified as the new bottleneck[0]? Like, new businesses will launch, or existing companies will identify new growth areas that they did not have the capacity to move into.

I don't know how to respond to your second paragraph. Looking in that direction is a bit too overwhelming.

[0] I think this was always the problem, not developer productivity

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#333

Post by kimbernator »

splittydev wrote: post #254
afavour wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it". You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.

The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened? Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.

I feel like there's this idea that progress is good because of economic output, but there's this much squishier and more subjective concept of how much a change impacts our satisfaction with life. I think cars have produced a lot of good in the world, but I also live in the US where we've paved so much of the world that people don't feel like being outside on their feet very much anymore. I think it's had some negative impacts on how we interact as humans.

I feel the same way about AI. Does it make me more productive? Sure. Does it make me suddenly hate the career I used to love? Definitely. Every day I'm told to move faster and to love this cool thing that takes away the math and low-level problem solving that I used to get so much enjoyment from and instead makes me a manager of a chatbot. Any attempt at moderation in the presence of upper management is met with clear threats to my job. Even better, my company (and so many others) are finding unlimited budgets for AI while putting off any sort of raises for the humans involved.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#334

Post by rozap »

GaryBluto wrote: post #299

Can I ask what the deal is with people saying anti-intellectual things and then finishing it with ", actually"? Where did this originate from from? Is it a shibboleth?

Saying that shunning the machine that is usurping human creativity and intelligence is "anti intellectual" is pretty funny

I'm not an AI hater but the implication of your comment is that being on the AI train is the intellectual position, which is wild, given the AI hype is almost entirely from CEOs, who are the furthest thing from.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#335

Post by pear01 »

egui wrote: post #195
velcrovan wrote: post #59

Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back. Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

This was clarifying? It reads like a sleepy undergrad's first attempt, complete with the constant meandering to satisfy some word count. The irony is a SOTA AI could make this person's case far more succinctly and convincingly. You really need to hold yourself (and the people you read) to a higher standard.

This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.

I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#336

Post by mindcrime »

coldtea wrote: post #296
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons we…

> This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. We could do without them.

Tell that to the family of someone who dies a year before one of those discoveries that would have saved their life...

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#337

Post by dspillett »

splittydev wrote: post #2

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping.

If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :)

Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#338

Post by joquarky »

coldtea wrote: post #296
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons we…

> This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. We could do without them.

I guess you don't know anyone who has cancer.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#340

Post by jesse_dot_id »

coldtea wrote: post #296
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons we…

> This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. We could do without them.

We could probably do without computers too, but that would be idiotic because they speed everything up. There's a good chance that the next pandemic is swatted down by LLM-powered vaccine development much faster than COVID-19 was.

"We could do without them." is not a great take when it comes to people dying prematurely.

In fact, I would bet that this particular technology will lead to climate change solutions eventually. If nothing else, it will drive an energy revolution in either nuclear or solar power. Probably too late to solve the AMOC collapse, but mitigation is still in play through science.

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